Tuesday, March 22, 2016

“Communists Campaign Against U.S. War Drive: Protest Cop Spying on Muslims and Mosques”

Timely read again, alas.

Excerpt:

....In their assault on our class, the rulers’ biggest target then, and now, is the section of the working class who are Muslims and Arabs, Sandler said. “Communists know the rights of the working class are what is always at stake when the capitalist rulers go to war.”

And the drive to war is being ramped up, Sandler said, in Washington, Paris and other imperialist capitals.

You see more soldiers and cops in Penn Station and Grand Central Station, he said. And the Bill de Blasio administration in New York is adding 560 counterterrorism intelligence cops to what is already a larger force than most countries have.

“The New York Socialist Workers Party plans to visit mosques and Muslim communities, get to know people and lend our support,” he said to applause. “I invite anyone who would like to join in to see me and sign up.”

“After Sept. 11 we discussed how the rulers and their government would try to make it sound like a classless ‘we’ made up the U.S. populace,” he said. “The same thing is developing in the wake of the murderous attack in Paris.”

The French legislature voted overwhelmingly to impose and extend a far-reaching state of emergency that gives cops more sweeping powers and guts political rights, Sandler said. There have been hundreds of raids inside France, with no warrant required. The French capitalist government wants to reinforce anti-working-class statutes, passed during French imperialism’s bloody but failed fight against the Algerian liberation struggle in the 1950s and ’60s, that allow for far-reaching spying and stripping citizenship from those named as terrorists.

The meeting featured debate on several questions. One participant said it was her opinion that the reactionary, terrorist Islamic State was growing and asked what was its attraction for young people and workers.

Islamic State attracts few youth

“I don’t think they attract many at all,” said Barnes, speaking from the audience. “There are millions and millions of Muslims and Arabs in France. Only a miniscule number are attracted to Islamic State. Go and sell the Militant at mosques and neighborhoods around them. You won’t find many favorable to Islamic State.”

Barnes contrasted the Algerian war for independence from France to the development of the brutal anti-working-class Islamic State.

IS was built by former officers from Saddam Hussein’s army — broken up by the U.S. invasion of Iraq — who merged with a handful of al-Qaeda terror adherents, Barnes said.

Young people in Algeria were fighting for their independence against extreme French brutality. Islamic State and its terror attacks has nothing to do with that, he said. It’s more like the murderous Pol Pot regime in Cambodia in the 1970s.

“We’re in a slow, slow depression,” Sandler said, “You don’t have bread lines like the 1930s, but it is depression conditions for working people and things are getting worse. That’s what motivates workers to go hear candidates like Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders, who say they’re something different, and why the Socialist Workers Party gets more of a hearing than in decades.”